Messi wins without running or touching the ball

What if

walks.

What if he presses or is in Babia.

What if he smiles or spits, murmurs or shut up.

What if he is a simple footballer or an

character

to whom each and every drop of sweat he spills must be measured.

left him on the bench for the first time.

His ankle ached or his soul was heavy.

What difference does it make.

He came out after the break with 1-1 on the scoreboard.

And without running, and without touching the ball, he finished with Betis.

What the heck.

Enclosed, stoked and signaled, Messi shattered the laws of the football routine and approached the inconceivable.

Geniuses are like that.

The Uruguayan goalkeeper

was remembered throughout his life that day in 1970 at the Mexican stadium in Jalisco where Pelé left him lying on the ground.

The goalkeeper did not know if he had to follow the ball or the forward.

Pelé went left as

ball

kept rolling to the right.

"But it was not a goal," always claimed the goalkeeper, proud to be the supporting actor of that legendary moment.

The pleasure is not always in the goal.

Nothing excites more than creative nirvana.

The accidental protagonists in the story at hand were

and

.

Messi made a little jump when there was no one who did not expect Alba's routine pass to be concluded by the Rosario.

It was not so.

With the Betis defeated,

, who had missed four goals, including a penalty, only had to push the ball into the net.

And the game, which had gone to rest with 1-1 and with Griezmann desperate, only gravitated around Messi.

The liberation of the 'ten'

The Argentine scored 3-1 after allowing

a shot that only the expelled

could take out

under sticks and with his arm.

He did not forgive the penalty.

At 4-2, the

released

some of those demons that had been harassing him - he had not scored on the move since last August against Napoli - with a hammer blow after

heel

.

Betis already sunk, no matter how much

took advantage of one of

multiple incursions from

the side,

was

still

able to score his first goal in the League to settle the day.

There will be many more.

Koeman's team experienced its two realities in the same afternoon.

From Barça without Messi to Barça with Messi there is still an ocean.

True, the defensive concessions continue to be too many.

snatched a goal from

in the first act, another from Loren in the second, and was beaten by

because nobody knew how to stop Álex Moreno -Dembélé and Sergi Roberto failed in that task-, and neither did they divert a center from

to the small area.

and

whistled.

Offensive intimidation, however, has nothing to do with Messi hovering around the final zone.

Griezmann and torment

It was only necessary to see Griezmann in the first half to understand it.

The world disappeared for the French.

Arms akimbo and a blank stare.

The head, who knows where.

After seeing how none of his three previous shots served to get the ball going where it should go, he claimed the ball again to shoot a penalty.

For Claudio Bravo it was enough to pay attention to the forward's body language to know that this would not be the time for redemption either.

It failed and Griezmann, we said, remained still.

So much so that he didn't even realize that

was offering him another chance at rejection.

What for the World Champion should be a reason for decompression, without Messi as a pantocrator, turned into torture.

Griezmann's torture was the torture of this Barcelona.

Insistent but musty.

Incapable of solving that psychic fragility inoculated for years from the offices of power, and to which the footballers could not find a remedy.

And that Dembélé had put Barcelona ahead in his own way.

That is, cutting with the right in a rough turn but so many times effective, and a tremendous left foot against which Bravo could not oppose anything.

But Betis de

, with

at the fore in the transitions, danced in the open steppe behind Dembélé's back.

Koeman found a remedy where his predecessors did so many times.

In Messi.

He sacrificed the bruised

, who was being the best Barça player and who had even forced the first penalty on Mandi.

But he flew an Argentinean who is always seen as a stranger embedded in an armchair.

It does not matter then that Messi runs.

Or walk.

"I don't want to walk among madmen," said Alice.

"Oh, you can't do anything," replied the cat.

"We are all crazy here."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• Ronald Koeman

• Ousmane Dembélé

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• First division

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